A History of the Middle East (74 page)

The remaining survivors were all absolute dynastic monarchies. Though many suffered from the same structural problems as the republics, they looked to their oil wealth and a conveniently timed price-hike to buy time. As the world’s largest exporter of natural gas and the Arab world’s smallest population, Qatar boasted the world’s highest per capita annual income of $143,000. Saudi Arabia boosted government spending by 50 percent between 2008 and 2011. The number of universities in Arab Gulf states mushroomed from one in 1950, to 28 in the 1980s, 40 in the 1990s and 120 in 2012. Attracted by booming economies, foreign investment rushed in.

Though it muted the impact, the funding did not render them immune from protest. Despite the repression, Bahrain failed to smother the cries for change. Two years on, its Shia villages remained semi-autonomous zones largely under the control of local activists. On their copious feast and mourning days, Bahrain’s Shias processions dominated the streets of their capital, Manama. And the reformist bloc Wifaq which pulled out of parliament lost ground
to more radical and clandestine voices, such as al-Haq, which advocated the overthrow of the monarchy. The al-Khalifas imposed emergency law, hauled tortured protestors before military tribunals and allayed more general protest by whipping up Sunnis against Shias with a torrent of propaganda portraying Shias as perfidious blasphemers on state television. Sunni youths toured the streets with swords, boycotted Shia businesses, and erected checkpoints to establish Shia exclusion zones.

Despite the regimes’ efforts to paint the stirrings as sectarian, the discontent spanned a cross-section of Gulf society. Tired of a paternalistic system unable to provide jobs and a hereditary system which denied them representation, young people in the Gulf, who are among the best connected and educated in the Arab world increasingly asked when their awakening might come. But their rulers looked on impervious. As per his constitution, the Sultan of Oman retained his titles of head of state and de facto Prime Minister, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Foreign Minister, Defence Minister and governor of the Central Bank. Saudi Arabia dismissed demands for national elections. Kuwait’s emir, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, dissolved a newly elected but unruly parliament in June 2012, after it launched an anti-corruption investigation. He issued an emergency decree, amending the electoral law to ensure a more pliant legislature, and had a member of the ruling family, Meshaal al-Malik al-Sabah, detained for tweeting that he would stand in fresh elections on a platform to ‘expose corruption among top officials’. Police clashed with protestors after loyalists won all fifty seats in fresh elections in December 2012 that were boycotted by the opposition. Even Qatar, which sold itself as the region’s font of cutting-edge critical journalism, replaced Wadah Khanfar, the director of Al Jazeera who was both an Islamist and an ardent supporter of civil rights, with a member of the emir’s al-Thani tribe. So quick to report criticism in other Arab states, its editors gagged any mention of the Emir’s prison sentence for a Qatari poet who criticized him.

Doubts over the royal successions accentuated concerns over
stability. Oman’s ageing sultan is heirless; and Saudi Arabia seems destined for ever-diminishing gaps between its kings as it holds fast to a line of succession which passes from one brother, not one generation, to the next. In 2013 King Abdullah was nearing 90, and by 2015 the youngest of his remaining brothers was set to be over 70 years old. Saudis likened their increasingly hospitalized leadership to that which marred the frequent change of leaders in the dying years of the Soviet Union.

Beset with internal challenges, the monarchs closed ranks. They upgraded the Gulf Cooperation Council into a union; its richer and larger members not only bailed out the smaller ones with less oil, particularly Oman and Bahrain, populations non-Sunni as noted, dispatched their forces to crush unruly Qatar, whose satellite channel goaded other protestors to overthrow their leaders, suspended coverage of Bahrain.

Jordan and Morocco, the Arab world’s two monarchies without access to oil wealth, had fewer resources to resist the winds of change. Both applied to join the GCC, but once rebuffed resorted to varying degrees of repression and reform to cushion their rule against protests. Moving quickly to confuse and divide the opposition, Morocco’s king Mohammed VI appeared on television promising a new constitution which stripped him of his infallibility. Before the end of the year he had held elections, allowed the country’s loyal Islamist movement, Justice and Development, to win, and appointed its leader, Abdullah Benkirane, first minister. A British diplomat likened the country’s transition to parliamentary monarchy to England’s 17th century Restoration, and compared its monarch’s title of Commander of the Faithful to the British monarch’s status as head of the Anglican Church. But Morocco remains far from being a constitutional monarchy. Its king presides over the Council of Ministers, the Supreme Security Council, and the Ulama Council, which administers the mosques. He runs the military, the security forces and the intelligence. Tellingly, when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travelled to the kingdom in March she met the king’s foreign affairs advisor ahead of the government’s Islamist foreign minister.

Moving more slowly and less dextrously, King Abdullah of Jordan interpreted any meaningful concession as a sign of weakness and a slippery slope that could lead to his downfall. He tinkered with his powers, touting the tweaks he had made to a third of the constitution. But unlike Morocco, he kept the right to appoint the prime minister, and shied from putting amendments to a referendum. Whereas Morocco’s king had courted the Islamists and elevated them to government, Jordan’s monarch schemed to exclude them. He endorsed a new electoral law which gerrymandered the seats to favour rural Beduin tribes, so infuriating the Brotherhood whose powerbase was in the cities that it declared a boycott. Exacerbating the unrest in late 2012, the king slashed subsidies to pay for his heavy borrowing used to calm the streets at the start of the Arab Awakening. Protestors, who had initially peppered their protests with cries of ‘S-S-S’ – hinting at the Arabic for ‘dismiss’, grew increasingly daring, openly chanting for the toppling of the king.

But though Jordan’s Islamist leaders reproved their ruler, few spoke of following Egypt by replacing him. The Brotherhood’s politicians still hung portraits of the king in their offices, albeit ones in which he sported a beard, and reluctantly admitted that for all their hunger for power and assets, their monarchs were more tolerant than the republics and slower to kill. Jordanian officials claimed that of some 7,000 protests in the two years of the Arab Awakening, only three people – one of them a policeman – were killed. Bahrain – the most repressive of the monarchies – killed 90 of its citizens in two years of protests, a small fraction of the killing fields in the republics. In an attempt to heal wounds, the al-Khalifas invited an international human rights commission to investigate security force abuses and released some of their political prisoners.

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In the four countries which toppled their leaders, new systems of government began to take root. The transition was smoothest in Tunisia and Egypt, where regime change was civil not military. By
hiving themselves off from the ruling clan, the old armed forces survived and provided a bridge between new and old. Their criticism of their outgoing presidents for
inter alia
seeking to establish dynasties and their refusal to fire on protestors ensured that the old order was co-opted rather than purged. In Egypt, the generals garnered sufficient legitimacy from their role in deposing Mubarak to form a junta, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which provided an interregnum pending transfer to civilian rule. Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, which claimed three million members on the eve of the election, was disbanded by court order on 16 April 2011 and its assets nationalized; but its members were allowed to compete for political office, and two of Mubarak’s former ministers contested the presidential elections. Similarly, although the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD) Party, which had ruled Tunisia since independence in 1956, was dissolved, only a few of its senior members were put on trial. Others, including Ben Ali himself, were allowed to flee into exile. Revenge killings were remarkably rare.

The continuum was even more pronounced in Yemen, where outside parties – primarily Saudi Arabia and the United States – helped negotiate a roadmap for stabilizing the transition. President Salih stepped down in February 2012 after 33 years in power, but he remained in the country, and his cronies and relatives, including his son and three nephews, continued to exercise power as security chiefs. In elections in February 2012, his long-standing deputy was the only candidate. Though the figurehead had changed, the old system survived.

Even Libya, where militias divided up much of the spoils in the post-Qaddafy era, held together. Despite the collapse of the security regimes, the flight of police and surfeit of weaponry, crime levels remained astonishingly low. Close-knit family, religious and tribal ties coupled with the glue of optimism in the dawn of a new era prevented the sort of looting and mugging which might have ravaged western societies faced with a parallel collapse of law and order. Testifying to their desire for central authority despite its
absence on the ground, Libyans went to the polls in large numbers in elections which were remarkably unscarred by violence. Federalism remained a dirty word. Militias continued to maintain their own prisons and makeshift judicial systems, but sensing their lack of legitimacy, donned national uniforms and repainted their looted vehicles in the colours of police cars. Along Libya’s borders, warlords managed the smuggling routes, reviving the ancient
entrepots
and coastal city-states, but oil revenues remained wholly under central control, ensuring that the government remained the country’s primary source of patronage and distributor of wealth.

Indeed, the forces that emerged out of the chaos largely conformed to the historical rule of thumb that authoritarian regimes that break down beget authoritarian successors. From Saddam Hussein onwards, all Arab states which ousted their leaders staged elections to choose their replacements. But as in Russia in 1917 and Iran in 1979, their successors quickly acquired the dictatorial traits of the past. In Iraq, Egypt and Tunisia, the victors were tempted to treat democracy as a system of winner takes all, rather than a mechanism of checks and balances on abuses of absolute power. Establishing democracies proved more complicated than simply erecting polling stations.

After years of bloodshed, Iraq’s turnaround was most striking. Far from being overrun after the US withdrawal in December 2011, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s hold strengthened. Unencumbered by US oversight, he tightened his control on the levers of repression. In the run-up to elections, his Shia-led coalition banned 500 candidates deemed to be Baathists, and after winning a second term, Maliki set about eliminating or neutering rivals within his own coalition. He had his Sunni deputy, Tarek al-Hashimi, charged with abetting terrorism, and allowed the Kurds nominally in charge of the Defence Ministry to seek kickbacks from arms contracts, while he filled the ranks of Iraq’s special forces, dubbed
Fedayeen al-Maliki
or Maliki’s guerrillas, with former Shia militiamen, who exercised control on the ground. When Kurdish leaders went to Washington in 2012, they tried to revive their Saddam-era refrain
that Iraq’s leader was threatening the autonomy that they had enjoyed since the first Gulf War by stationing his forces along the Green line with Kurdistan, and warned America against supplying Maliki with F16 warplanes. But the US Congress was no longer listening. The economy grew 10 per cent in 2012 and revenues increased as Iraq accelerated oil production, to the point where Maliki suggested that Iraq would challenge Saudi Arabia as the world’s swing-producer.

In Egypt, too, the ascendant religious parties seemed prone to the lingering ways of the past. Banned, jailed and downtrodden for 48 years, the Muslim Brotherhood ran election campaigns for parliament and the presidency promising to end the repression of the former security regime. They highlighted their leadership, drawn from the ranks of professionals and technocrats, and trumpeted a new notion of government, in which citizens were equal before the law, civilians exercised oversight over the military and leaders ruled with the consent of the governed. But having won power in both parliamentary and presidential elections, the air of Islamist triumphalism rapidly eroded hopes of a more consensual age. Khairat al-Shatr, a Brotherhood leader, declared his intention to appoint loyalists to ‘the 15,000 positions of power’.

As the Brotherhood consolidated its hold on government, its fleeting alliance with secular forces rapidly unravelled. In opposition, both had protested the
mukhabarat
’s pervasive intrusion on personal freedoms, the bureaucracy’s repressive and unaccountable ways, the lack of military accountability and the democratic deficit. But in power, the Brotherhood saw advantages in retaining many of Mubarak’s powers that they had previously castigated. Five months after winning the June 2012 presidential elections, the triumphant Islamists rushed approval of a constitution through a constituent assembly in a single overnight session, despite the boycott of Copts and liberals. As in the past, it provided for a presidential system and limitations on labour rights and press freedoms. It also gave Al Azhar, the Sunni world’s prime theological centre based in Cairo, a degree of oversight over legislation. Rather than bring opposition ministers
into his cabinet, the new president, Mohammed al-Morsi, himself a former US-trained Brotherhood leader, co-opted conservative Islamists from the Salafis parties who in the parliamentary elections of 2011–12 won more than a quarter of the vote. He passed a decree assuming powers that placed him above the law, and appointed his own public prosecutor, who set to work investigating opposition leaders for ‘inciting against the president’.